The Woman Who Wrote "King Lear," and Other Stories

By Louis Phillips

Fiction. This wildly imaginative collection of fourteen short stories won't move you to tears, but will very likely move you to laughter. Phillips writes about a "committee of grief," about termites in Africa, about Lee Harvey Oswald's can opener. He tells of how an angry consumer shows his disdain for the telephone company by sending out false bills which, ultimately, leads to the withdrawal of the state of Iowa from the union. In one crazy piece, Phillips describes the chaos that occurs when a cat finds Thomas Hardy's heart, and, well, devours it, disrupting plans to put the heart on display. And he writes that amazing title story: Yes, it's true. "King Lear" was penned by Radcliffe Graduate Muriel B. Hopkins, not by the esteemed William Shakespeare. What is the theme connecting these stories? Madness, perhaps, but not only the madness of single characters - these stories are also about the "madness of crowds." Read these stories, but be prepared to confront new realities, some of which you may never entirely escape.

• Language: English
• Publisher: PBS Publications
• Release date: Mar 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9781545722077

Book preview

Opener

Errata

In last month’s issue, we were privileged to publish a new short-story by Louis Phillips. The story, as you may remember, was titled Errata, and it has elicited thousands of letters expressing admiration for its grace, style, and felicity of expression.

Unfortunately, as the author and numerous irate readers have pointed out, the story contained a small number of printer’s errors. The printers’ and editors’ strike of last months has finally been settled, and so we hope to resume our unusually high standards of careful proof-reading, but we feel that we should bring to your attention the errors that occurred in last month’s story:

ERRATA

TITLE PAGE: The author was Louis Phillips and not Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Page ONE: The main character was Mr. Malone, not Ms. Malone.

Page TWO: Pages two and three got reversed in the editing process. Page Three should be Page Two. Page Two should be Page Three. All other pages, however, are correctly numbered.

PAGE TWO (old Page Three): The sentence that reads, Mr. Malone was ravished by Mr. Phillipott in a hanging garden where a dead moose was rotting, should read, Ms. Malone was not ravished by Mr. Phillipott in a hanging garden where a dead mouse was rooting.

PAGE FOUR: The paragraph that reads, So saying the fair and hospitable dame took our hero by the hand; and the touch was light, and the force was gentleness, and though Robin read in her eyes what he did not hear in her words, yet the slender-waisted woman in the scarlet petticoat proved stronger than the athletic country youth. She had drawn his half-willing footsteps nearly to the threshold, when the opening of a door in the neighborhood startled the Major’s housekeeper, and leaving the Major’s kinsman, she vanished speedily into her own domicile.—actually comes from Hawthorne’s My Kinsman, Major Molineux. How this unfortunate interpolation came about is difficult to explain, though it has been pointed out that the same firm that typesets our stories was also in the process of setting type for an anthology of short fiction by American authors.

In your edition of The Woman Who Wrote King Lear & Other Lurid Tales for Readers Drawn to Sex and Violence on an Operatic Scale, please delete Mr. Hawthorne’s paragraph and substitute the following: "Major Phillipott, father of Amos and beloved husband of Robin, a fair and hospitable dame, was indeed haunted by a terrible sin. The Fall of Mankind was no abstract theological concept to the Major’s tortured soul; the Fall occupied the very center of his Ground of Being. One could trace to the Fall, that most important moment in the history of the world, the Major’s major obsession: he hated mistakes. He despised slovenliness. He attacked minor errors with the same loud enthusiasm used to dispatch the Arabs at Khartoum (General George Gordon, the Egyptian governor general of the Sudan, had been Phillipott’s childhood heroes). [CLARIFY THIS—PLURAL? THEN WHO?] His mornings were frequently spent dictating heated letters to the London Times or to the Manchester Guardian.

Once when he found a nightshirt left over the arm of a chair, the Major flew into a rage. Since the nightshirt belonged to the hapless Amos, then only ten years of age and far away from his tragic episode with Ms. Malone and the dead mouse, the Major ordered his son’s entire wardrobe burned. The servants, blushing under a flurry of grotesque orders, gathered together every shirt, pair of trousers, socks, shoes, underwear, suspenders, ties, vests, corsets, and piled the clothing in the front lawn.

In front of the weeping Amos, Major Phillipott doused the freshly starched materials with a container of kerosene and he lit the match himself.

Unfortunately, the conflagration got entirely out of hand. A surge of wind took the lawn by surprise. Trees, grass, hedges, two servants, and eventually the manor house itself were badly singed. Major Phillipott, too proud to admit that he himself had committed an error of judgment, refused to place a call to the fire department; but as the fire was spreading to the upstairs bedrooms, the Major’s wife, bravely fighting off hysteria, attempted to call for help. Alas, Amos, in great anger because of the unjust humiliation heaped upon his now naked shoulders, had severed the telephone cords with a pair of hedge-cutters stolen from the gardener’s shed. The shed, in fact, was the only out-building left standing. In a frantic last-ditch effort that bordered upon desperation, Mrs. Phillipott, nee Sedgewick, retired to her bedroom and dictated a letter to her secretary, a certain Ms. Malone (who shall play a much larger role later in our tale), a slender-waisted (wasted?) [IS THIS SUPPOSED TO BE HERE?] young woman, who created something of a scandal in the major’s household by her frequent sportings in a scarlet petticoat (the very same petticoat found in the field near the dead mouse). The letter was addressed to the Suffolk County Department of Pyrotechnics and Fire-tending:

To Whom It May Concern (the epistle began),

My husband, the Honourable Major Horace M. Phillipott, has accidentally set a fire that now threatens our estate and manor house and all the valuables they contain, including the Major’s collection of rare postal errors (inverts, over-printings, and incorrect colors). I therefore humbly beg your department to send out your fire-wagons as soon as this epistle falls into your hands.

Warmly yours,

Robin H. Phillipott (Mrs.)

PAGE SIX: The two pages of stock market listings are not part of the story proper. They were inserted by mistake.

PAGE SIX A: The sentence that reads, Amos Phillipott joined a nudist colony, and he refused to wear clothes for the rest of his life, while his mother moved to London to work as an assistant to a producer of stage plays, should have read "cautere sur une jambe de bois."

PAGE EIGHT: There is no page eight. As far as we can tell.

PAGE NINE-A: The name of the main character was misspelled. The correct spelling is Amos Phillipott. Please correct throughout.

PAGE TEN: The bird identified as a Ruby-Crowned Kinglet was incorrectly identified. The bird that Amos saw, while frolicking in the field with the secretary, was, in all probability, a fulvous tree duck.

PAGE ELEVEN: The sentence should read, Ruddy ducks have been known to cock their tails. We wish to apologize to all readers who were offended by the obscenity that resulted from an irate editor’s transcription.

PAGE XII: The recipe calling for twelve pounds of raisins should be replaced by the following sentences that were inadvertently dropped from the main body of the text: "It was not until nearly two decades after the death of Major Phillipott (he died from inhaling kerosene in the back seat of his Rolls while the automobile was on fires) that the now-Lady Phillipott finally met her son in one of the high-priced nudist camps that dot the shore of Southern France. Cautere sur une jambe de bois, she thought but did not speak because she was thinking in a language she could not pronounce. She did not at all feel embarrassed walking naked, hand in hand with her son. But she finally realized how wrong-headed her husband had been in burning her son’s clothes. There are some experiences a family can live without.

PAGE 16 and 3/4: The final page of the story somehow blended into the beginning of Linda Bucknell’s article, Ten Things To Do with Your Son or Daughter on a Hot Summer Day. The final sentence of the story should read, When it came night, the white waves paced to and fro in the moonlight, and the wind brought the sound of the great sea’s voice to the men on the shore, and they felt that they could then be interpreters. Delete: Give into the ecstasy of endless love. Delete: Build a stove from scratch.

ADDENDUM

Ordinarily we would be pleased to reprint the story in its correct form, but we feel that in this unusual case that there were so very few errors involved, and all of the minor variety, and that the story itself was somehow enhanced by the additions made—well, we have printed the errata sheet. We allow each reader to judge for himself/herself.

Suddenly I Do Not Equate the Light with Anything But Madness: The Best Short Story of 2010

If you look through THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 2010, you will find my story there. It won first prize that year, beating out some pretty good company. Joyce Carol Oates was there with a story about beating up Norman Mailer, and Norman Mailer was there with a story about beating up Joyce Carol Oates, and John Updike was there with a piece about Rabbit beating up himself and going to Heaven and meeting both Joyce Carol Oates and Norman Mailer. I’m telling you that the writing game is a pretty rough business and very political. What the poor say is true: It’s not what you know, but who. Whom?

How I found out that my story had been printed, however, is a story unto itself. But we all have stories and the longer I live, the more I think that all of our stories are pretty much alike. It is as if you woke up one morning and carried with you all the voices of the world. Such voices stick to you, and no matter how hard you try you cannot shake the voices off. "Alles ist innig."

Didn’t the editors tell you that they were going to print your story? my father asks. John is having quite a difficult time reading the pieces because the sun is in his eyes, bouncing off the page, and he is too proud or too lazy to go inside to get sunglasses. Or maybe he does have sunglasses and the sun is in my eyes so I cannot make out the title of my own story. I know I had sent the story to somebody, but somebody didn’t like it. The story kept coming back. Then one day it didn’t come back anymore. I had gone to the Police Station to swear out a Missing Documents Report, but the police, up to their ears in Neo-Platonism, held out no hope for its return. So many stories disappear every year, the sergeant said. He was a kind man, in his early sixties and on the edge of retirement. He had seen stories of all shapes and sizes walk off the face of the earth. Three years ago they had uncovered an unpublished fragment by Holderlin in a warehouse in New Jersey. The fragment had been left in storage by Warner Brothers.

Of course, by the age of 36, Holderlin had gone insane. No wonder. "Alles ist innig. Just because it happened to Joyce or to McCullers or any of those other guys, it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen to you," the sergeant said.

He didn’t mean to be unkind. He was merely telling the truth. Just because it happens to someone else it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen to you. Actually he reminded me of my father. I left Precinct 23 with about twenty posters. (The missing document artist had reconstructed my story to the best of his abilities, but in truth my powers of description were woefully inadequate. There were so many touching passages missing. No one could hope to identify the story from the outline on the poster). The only part that made any sense at all was the making of my child.

In addition, the posters from the police station were printed upon white paper. It is difficult to take seriously a story printed upon white paper, even if the story does concern a father and a son digging up the corpse of the boy’s mother so that the body can be moved to another cemetery. Such a story does not make much of an impact nowadays. We are interested in something else. And we all know what the philosopher G. E. Moore says about the assertion that Blue exists: If we are told that the assertion ‘Blue exists’ is meaningless unless we mean by it that ‘the sensation of blue exists,’ we are told what is certainly false and self-contradictory. . . . We can and must conceive the existence of blue as something quite distinct from the existence of the sensation. We can and must conceive that blue might exist and yet the sensation of blue not exist. For my own part I not only conceive this, but I conceive it to be true. For my part all I do is look up at the sky and see that it is sometimes blue; though, of course, I realize that even sky blue is an illusion. An illusion like so many stories, so much memory. My mind is mostly blue movies.

I look across my mother’s grave and see that my father is wearing a blue work shirt and blue jeans. He’s in his late seventies and he can still put in a good day’s work without complaining. He used to be a carpenter, but now he builds odds and ends for friends and neighbors. Don’t whine, just do it, he would tell me when I was a child. I believed him then. I believe him now.

Didn’t the editor even tell you they were printing your story? John asks me again. I have wandered off into my own thoughts. I have been doing that a lot lately, much to the distress of my friends. I am burning out, but I can’t stop. Too many papers to grade. Too many part time jobs. The honor of being recognized for a story that is not even mine has come too late, much too late to do me any good at all. It is about as much use as a toothache, though to tell the truth I have had a toothache all week, and I am beginning to enjoy it. Its pain is weaning me into real life, luring me away from complacency. I go over the Catechism of Stone in my head. The Catechism of Stone is a series of ideas about the relationship that exists between a stone and the hand that throws it, a catechism my father and I have frequently recited to each other, though often when my father gets the drunk the catechism eludes him, and The Shooting of Dan McGrew ends up in its place. How often do we start off with one story and end up with another? You only have to read The Best Short Stories from 2010 from cover to cover to know the answer.

Therefore, says Simonides, I shall never spend my allotted span of life vainly in infeasible hope, seeking that which cannot come to pass—a fully blameless man. None of us who win our bread from the wide earth. . . . People are talking to me all the time, and I never know what to say in reply. Orchids. I suppose one could say orchids in reply. One could open one’s mouth and pull out flowers.

_______________, says my father, tossing down his shovel and reaching for a bucket. Ironic that he almost kicks the bucket in a literal sense. It’s his idea that my mother’s body should be dug up and moved to Syracuse for reinterment. She should be near her parents, my father insists. When you die you should go back to your family. He’s old, and so that’s the way he thinks about things, not the way G. E. Moore thinks about things, say, the color blue, or Holderlin, or Simonides. We think things; we say things; we forget them. I am forty-four and angry all the time. How does the commercial go about G. E. Moore? G. E. brings good things to life?

Three feet into the tender earth, my mother, my father, and I have encountered an underground spring, and the water flows into the grave so rapidly that we must bail like crazy.

"Sonavabitchingflyingfuckingwater. My father swears a blue streak. Up one side of the grave to the other, with both of us standing in the muck and mire, mud slopping into my one pair of shoes. The spring gurgles like a demented child crazy with happiness that it has done something to thwart the best-laid plans of mice and men. Bail, bail, bail," my father mutters to himself, and then glares at me as if the water pouring over the remains of his dead wife is somehow my fault because he knows that I am superstitious and do not want the body moved.

"Sonavabitchingflyingfuckingwater." The hidden spring flows in at such a slow rate that my father and I, working in tandem, each of us bailing as if we were in a leaky boat—where we have been more than once in our lives,—can undo it, work beyond it and bring my mother or what remains of her to the surface.

You can slow down now, John says. We got it licked.

Overdoing it! That’s what I want to do. I want to come on with everything and crazy and break the skull of the world wide open. I’m a madman all right and I don’t care who knows it. Alas, Yorick.

I pick up my shield and run my hand over its convex front. It is the kind of shield called a Goolmary. Long. Heavy. The back of the shield is nearly flat. In spite of the July heat, I know I must dress in full armor. To tell the truth I need a new shield. A man should not go into new battles with the same old weapons. A trip across town is in order. There the washer woman waits. She too up to her arms in water. No, I said. I think the editors wanted it to be a surprise.

Is it?

Of course, I say. But to tell the truth I am embarrassed.

"I would be too. It’s not well thought out. Something essential is missing. I wanted to cry and there is nothing to cry over, and what’s all that stuff about going crosstown